Posts Tagged ‘Reuters’

(Reuters) – An attorney for Casey Anthony would not confirm on Monday whether his client boarded a plane after her swift weekend exit from jail but said “elaborate plans” were required to keep her safe.

Anthony’s whereabouts have been a closely guarded secret since her release early Sunday after nearly three years in custody on charges connected to the 2008 death of her 2-year-old daughter Caylee.

A Florida jury acquitted Anthony, 25, on July 5 of killing Caylee but convicted her of lying to detectives during the search for the then-missing child. Caylee’s remains were found in December 2008 in woods near the Anthony family home.

Casey Anthony left the Orlando jail just after midnight on Sunday, escorted by attorney Jose Baez and guards wearing bullet-proof vests and carrying rifles.

She stepped into a waiting SUV and quickly eluded the helicopters, media and angry public gathered to witness her anticipated departure.

Her attorneys have been mum about where Anthony went.

“I will not confirm if she boarded a plane or flew on her own,” defense attorney Cheney Mason told NBC’s Today show on Monday.

“She’s gone, she’s safe and elaborate plans had to be made to keep the people away from her.”

Mason said life will be difficult for Anthony “as long as there are so many people of the lynch mob mentality and those willing to deny the fact that the jury found her not guilty (of murder).”

He said Anthony continues to deal with the loss of her child and must adjust psychologically to her newfound freedom.

“In Miss Anthony’s case, it’s going to be even more of an adjustment because she is coming out vilified virtually universally, not just in the Central Florida area but across the country, if not the world,” Anthony’s civil lawyer Charles Greene told the Central Florida News 13 channel.

Greene represents Anthony, who left jail with the $537.68 remaining in her inmate account, in several lawsuits.

A non-profit group seeks to recoup more than $100,000 spent on the search for Caylee, and a Florida woman has accused Anthony of defaming her by claiming a nanny of the same name kidnapped the toddler.

On Friday, a man named David Badali sued Anthony to recover the expenses he incurred as a diver who participated in the search for Caylee.

Attorneys for Anthony and her parents did not return calls from Reuters on Monday morning.

POP-UP The Dîner en Blanc, or impromptu “dinner in white,” in the Cour Carrée at the Louvre in Paris. New York is having its own.

By LIESL SCHILLINGER

Published: July 5, 2011

THERE are picnics, and then there are picnics.

Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters

DRESS CODE Notre Dame was one of two sites for Paris’s Dîner en Blanc. Guests, all in white, brought their own tables and food.

Three weeks ago, in the golden light of an early-summer evening, thousands of Parisians dressed entirely in white converged on two of the city’s most picturesque locations — 4,400 of them in the plaza at the cathedral of Notre Dame; 6,200 in a courtyard of the Louvre — for a feast that was neither advertised nor publicly heralded. They had brought along not only their own epicurean repasts but also their own tables, chairs, glasses, silver and napery.

At midnight, after dining and dancing, they packed up their dishes, stowed their empty Champagne bottles in trash bags brought for that purpose, stooped to pick up their cigarette butts from the cobbles and departed. The landmarks were left immaculate, with no traces of the revelry of the previous three hours.

This annual event, called the Dîner en Blanc — the “dinner in white” — is like a gustatory Brigadoon, equal parts mystery, anachronism and caprice. Now attended by thousands at some of the best-known Parisian spaces, it began humbly in 1988. That year, François Pasquier, now 67, returned to Paris after a few years abroad and held a dinner party to reconnect with friends. So many wanted to come that he asked them to convene at the Bois de Boulogne and to dress in white, so they could find each other.

But while in certain circles in Paris, everybody knows about the Dîner, many Parisians have never heard of it. And despite the precision that goes into its planning, it retains an air of surprise.

For the first time, New York will have its own Dîner en Blanc, on Aug. 25, rain or shine. A thousand people — half invited, the others drawn from an online waiting list (newyork.dinerenblanc.info) — will participate in this refined flash-mob feast, at an as-yet undisclosed location in Manhattan.

The New York event is being spearheaded by Mr. Pasquier’s son, Aymeric, who lives in Montreal, where he inaugurated the Canadian version of the Dîner en Blanc in 2009. But can brawny Manhattan, with skyscrapers from top to bottom, innumerable regulations and a dearth of public spaces on a Parisian scale, possibly approximate the romance of the French pique-nique? The New York organizers, Daniel Laporte and Alexandra Simoes, are hopeful.

“The emphasis is on spontaneity, but we are making absolutely sure to be completely in accordance with all city rules,” said Ms. Simoes, an elementary school director at the Lyceum Kennedy, who volunteered for the Dîner organizing job. “But we don’t want the guests to be impacted by our concerns. The guests should only be concerned about the dress code, and the tables they’ll carry, and what kind of food they will prepare.”

Mr. Laporte, a Canadian-born architect whom Aymeric Pasquier asked to participate, said: “Everything is extremely carefully organized, because to seat a thousand people at the same moment you need a lot of planning. But the most important thing is for everyone to have the best memory of the night.”

In New York, as in Montreal, the Dîner en Blanc is being conducted openly, facilitated by Facebook and Twitter and other online aids, and coordinated with municipal authorities. But in Paris, despite the tacit approval of government officials, the Dîner is private — a massive demonstration of the power of word of mouth, and the strength of social connections. The guest list is made up entirely of friends, and friends of friends. And despite the dinner’s vast and visible attendance, it has remained discreetly under the radar. Paris is still a class-stratified society — “It’s horizontal, whereas Montreal is vertical,” Aymeric Pasquier explained — so unwritten rules of privilege have allowed secrecy to surround the event. Nobody is sure who decides, year in, year out, which people are invited to create tables for the evening.

François Pasquier calls the party-list formation a “pyramide amicale,” a friendly pyramid; trusted friends invite their own trusted friends. The event’s exclusivity was evident just before the Dîner en Blanc in Paris on June 16. As I hurried with my dinner companions along a bridge to Notre Dame last month, passersby stopped us.

At 8 o’clock, clusters of diners emerged from the Metro or chartered buses to gather at rallying points, where they had been instructed to meet their “heads of table,” the organizers who had invited them. The site is revealed at the last moment, both to avoid gate-crashing and to preserve instantaneousness. The guests, decked out in white suits, dresses, skirts, feather boas and even wings, carried heavy picnic gear and delicacies like pâté de foie gras, poached salmon and fine cheeses — each table brings its own meal.

At about 9, with the sky still light, the site was announced. Guests hurried across bridges and side streets to reach their destination. By 9:30, all the tables had been deployed in orderly rows, according to diagrams in the possession of the heads of table, with men all along one side, women along the other. The guests quickly covered their tables with white cloths; laid out the crystal for Champagne, wine and water; the plates for hors d’oeuvres, main course and dessert; and began tucking in.

As night fell on Notre Dame, a clergyman appeared and blessed the throng, and church bells rang out overhead; at the Louvre, opera singers serenaded the diners. At 11 in both places, diners stood on chairs and waved sparklers — signaling the end of dinner and the beginning of the dancing (to D.J.’ed music at Notre Dame, and to a brass band at the Louvre). An hour later, the frolickers switched off the merriment and packed up their tables to depart, like Cinderella, on the stroke of midnight.

Needless to say, New York presents its own challenges. As in France, the organizers have created a fleet of “heads of table” who will collect picnickers at various meeting points around the city and shepherd them to the location. But some differences will apply. For one thing, it’s likely that Champagne will not be permitted, if the Dîner is held in a public location. For another, the proceedings are expected to end at 11.

“Even if we can’t have Champagne, it will be nice still,” Ms. Simoes said.

Mr. Laporte said, “After this year, the city will know the beauty of the Dîner,” adding, “We can show them that a big group can be very respectful.”

As in Paris, guests in New York will have a strong incentive to uphold the code of conduct. If they misbehave — for example, by bringing uninvited guests, getting too rowdy or not showing up or helping to clean — they will receive a punishment worse than any police fine: being barred from future dinners.

“Any guest who doesn’t respect the rules of behavior will be put on a blacklist and never invited back again,” Aymeric Pasquier said.

Initially, Mr. Laporte and Ms. Simoes worried that New Yorkers would find these rules too demanding.

“But the more we talked to our New York friends,” Ms. Simoes said, “the more we realized that they were fascinated by the idea that it was difficult and special, and that you have to build your own dinner and bring your own table.”

(Reuters) – The former fiancé of accused child killer Casey Anthony testified on Tuesday that she claimed she once woke up to find her older brother standing over her, staring at her while she slept.

Judge Belvin Perry called Jesse Grund’s testimony impermissible hearsay evidence, and said he won’t allow the jury to hear it unless defense lawyers persuade him otherwise with sufficient legal arguments.

Grund said Casey told him about her experience with her brother after Grund asked her why she didn’t want her daughter Caylee to be around Lee Anthony.

Prosecutors say Casey, 25, smothered 2-year-old Caylee on June 16, 2008 so that she could “live the good life” free of the demands of motherhood. They say Casey stored the child’s body in her car trunk, then dumped it in woods near her home.

Defense attorney Jose Baez told jurors in his opening statement that Caylee accidentally drowned in the Florida family’s backyard pool, and the death went unreported.

Baez said Casey was sexually abused, and that explained why she partied and seemed inappropriately carefree after her daughter’s death.

But Baez has yet to produce evidence of the alleged abuse during Casey’s murder trial, now in its sixth week.

Casey’s father, George Anthony, has denied molesting her. Earlier this month, Perry scolded Baez when he asked a witness whether Lee could be Caylee’s father.

Much of the testimony on Tuesday came from Roy Kronk, the water department meter reader who discovered Caylee’s remains in a swampy part of a wooded area near the Anthony home in the Orlando area.

Kronk said he called the sheriff’s department three times in August 2008 to report he found what looked like a small skull.

At the time, a nationwide search was underway to find Caylee, who Casey claimed was kidnapped by a nanny. Special phone lines were created to handle the thousands of tips and leads sent to authorities.

But detectives were zeroing in on Casey, who they knew had lied extensively about Caylee’s disappearance.

Kronk said no one took him seriously until December 11, 2008, when he stopped at the location again and verified the object was in fact a skull. His supervisor alerted authorities, who arrived at the site and found Caylee’s remains.

MAJOR DISCOVERY

Kronk is a key witness for the defense. Baez has insinuated that Kronk played some sort of role in the disposal of Caylee’s body. The lawyer told jurors Kronk had sole “control” of Caylee’s remains during the intervening four months and claimed he was motivated by a $225,000 reward.

However, the reward money was offered to anyone who found Caylee alive.

“I just simply tried to do the right thing,” said Kronk, who noted he received $5,000 from the crime tip line.

Kronk testified he first spotted what looked like a skull on August 11, 2008 while taking a break with two co-workers, and called a crime tip line later that night to report the object.

Kronk said he called the Orange County Sheriff’s Office again on the evening of August 12 and the morning of August 13 before finally getting deputies to meet him at the location.

Two deputies came but neither went into the woods nor asked him to show them the skull-like object, Kronk said.

One deputy walked as far as a flooded area, quickly looked from side to side, slipped on mud on his way back to the roadside, and then berated Kronk for 30 minutes for wasting his time, the meter reader testified.

Kronk’s co-worker, David Dean, confirmed Kronk’s account of discovering the skull. Within a few weeks, Dean testified, a tropical storm deluged the area with rain.

Prosecutors have suggested one reason no one saw the remains during subsequent searches in the area was because it was under water.

George Anthony took the stand briefly again on Tuesday, denying assertions by Baez that he had an affair with search volunteer Krystal Holloway. George testified he only went to Holloway’s condominium to comfort her after learning she had cancer.

“I never had a romantic affair,” George said.

He denied ever telling Holloway that “Caylee’s death was an accident that snowballed out of control.” He also said he never told her that he grabbed Casey by the throat, threw her against a wall and demanded Casey tell him where Caylee was.

For one thing, domains don’t matter because Google knows where everything is, and it doesn’t care about domains. Google doesn’t care if your website lives inside a sub-sub-sub directory on an obscure sub-domain sitting in a neglected corner of an old server rack kept in a barn in Oregon.

As long as the stuff the sites contains has a high enough pagerank, Google will be happy to index it and present it as a search result. Or to put it another way: as long as it matters, people will be able to find it.

And that’s just one reason why domains are losing importance. Williams has a whole list of others.

People used to think that having a single-word .com domain was the only way to ensure success, but that’s simply no longer the case. People are still finding their way to what they want, with or without a “good” domain name attached to it.

Does this mean an end to domain name speculation, and to people paying huge fees for great one-worders? No, it probably doesn’t. There’s one thing still in a good domain’s favor, and that’s for word-of-mouth.

People are still much happier to say “Where did I get these shoes? I bought them at someamazingonlineshoestore.com.” They won’t say “I faved a Tweet by some guy that linked to a saved search that took me to some site I can’t remember. But thanks for asking.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – New safety rules take effect in the United States next week that will ban the manufacture and sale of traditional drop-side rail cribs.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission ordered the ban on the popular cribs late last year amid growing evidence they had played a role in the suffocation or strangulation deaths of dozens of infants over the past decade.

But hotels, motels and day care centers in the country can continue to use drop-side rail cribs for another 18 months. After December 28, 2012, those businesses must switch to cribs that comply with the tougher new federal standards.

The new rules, the first change in U.S. crib standards in 30 years, also require manufacturers to make mattress supports and hardware used in cribs stronger and more durable and to subject their products to more rigorous safety testing.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Men who consume the recommended amount of vitamin D are somewhat less likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke than those who get little of the vitamin in their diets, a large U.S. study suggests.

Following nearly 119,000 adults for two decades, researchers found that men who got at least 600 international units (IU) of vitamin D each day — the current recommended amount — were 16 percent less likely to develop heart problems or a stroke, versus men who got less than 100 IU per day.

There was no such pattern among women, however, the researchers report in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

The authors say the findings do not prove that vitamin D, itself, deserves the credit for the lower risks seen in men. So they should not start downing supplements for the sake of their hearts.

“The evidence is not strong enough yet to make solid recommendations,” said lead researcher Dr. Qi Sun, a research associate at the Harvard School of Public Health.

On the other hand, the apparent benefits were linked to vitamin D intakes near what’s already recommended: Last year, the Institute of Medicine (IOM), a scientific advisory panel to the U.S. government, bumped up the recommended dose to 600 IU for most people. Adults older than 70 were told to get 800 IU.

So these latest findings may encourage more people to meet those guidelines, Sun said.

But as far as whether vitamin D cuts heart disease and stroke risk, the jury is still out.

Sun said that more answers should come from an ongoing clinical trial that is looking at whether a high dose of vitamin D (2,000 IU per day) can cut the risk of heart disease, stroke and other chronic diseases.

Clinical trials, wherein people are randomly assigned to a treatment or a placebo, are considered the “gold standard” of medical evidence.

So far, there have been few such randomized clinical trials testing vitamin D’s health effects.

A flurry of studies in recent years has linked higher vitamin D intake to lower risks of everything from diabetes, to severe asthma, heart disease, certain cancers and depression.

The problem with those studies is that were “observational” — researchers looked at people’s vitamin D intake, or their blood levels of the vitamin, and whether they developed a given health condition. Those kinds of studies cannot prove cause-and-effect.

The current study was also observational, based on data from two long-term projects that have followed two large groups of U.S. health professionals since the 1980s.

Out of 45,000 men, there were about 5,000 new cases of cardiovascular disease over the study period. These were defined by an incident of heart attack, stroke, or death attributed to cardiovascular disease.

After accounting for a range of factors — like age, weight, exercise levels and other diet habits, such as fat intake – Sun’s team found that men who got at least 600 IU of vitamin D from food and supplements had a 16 percent lower risk of heart attack and stroke compared to men who got less than 100 IU of vitamin D per day.

For women, though, there was no correlation between vitamin D intake and cardiovascular health.

It’s not clear why that is, Sun said. One possibility is that women may have less active vitamin D circulating in the blood; vitamin D is stored in fat, and women typically have a higher percentage of body fat than men do.

But more research is needed, Sun said, to know whether real biological differences underlie the current findings.

In theory, vitamin D could help ward off heart disease and stroke; lab research suggests that it may help maintain healthy blood vessel function and blood pressure levels, reduce inflammation in the blood vessels, and aid blood sugar control.

But until clinical trials help show whether vitamin D works, Sun advised people to stick with the tried-and-true ways of protecting their hearts: maintaining a healthy weight, getting regular exercise, eating a well-balanced diet and not smoking.

“There are many established ways to lower your cardiovascular disease risk,” Sun said. “People can focus on those measures.”

As for vitamin D, the sun is the major natural source, since sunlight triggers vitamin D synthesis in the body. Food sources are relatively few and include fatty fish like salmon and mackerel, and fortified dairy products and cereals.

A government push to get more people tested for HIV resulted in more than 18,000 new diagnoses over three years. Students form a red ribbon during an HIV/AIDS awareness rally on World AIDS Day at Marina beach in the southern Indian city of Chennai. (Reuters / December 10, 2010)

More people with HIV are aware of their status because of a three-year government campaign to get people, especially blacks, tested for the disease—18,432 people, to be exact. But not all got plugged into treatment afterward, says the CDC in a new report.

In 2007, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gave $111 million for expanding HIV testing to health departments in 24 states and the District of Columbia, where many blacks had already been diagnosed with AIDS. Nearly 2.8 million HIV tests were conducted between 2007 and 2010 as a result, and about 0.7% resulted in new diagnoses, the agency announced Friday in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Blacks made up about 60% of the tests and about 70% of the new HIV diagnoses.

Most, but far from all, of those diagnosed were linked to care afterward. Among the cases with follow-up data, 91% received their test results and 75% were linked to care.

Such follow-up care is crucial if the Expanded HIV Testing Initiative is to support the broader national strategy to reduce HIV/AIDS in the U.S., the CDC says in the report:

“However, for efforts like ETI to translate into better individual and population-level outcomes, persons infected with HIV must be engaged and retained in care, receive and adhere to effective treatment with HAART [highly active antiretroviral therapy] to maximize viral load suppression, and have access to ongoing prevention and support services, including risk-reduction counseling and other evidence-based behavioral interventions, partner services, substance use and mental health treatment, and case management.”

Officials hope that expanded testing might change the fact that 20% of those living with HIV don’t know it.

But there are signs, if slight, of progress. For the first time in nearly 10 years, there was an increase (just a bit) in the percentage of people (particularly young adults) who were “very concerned” about getting HIV, according to results from a Kaiser Family Foundation survey released earlier this week.